Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The literature on the financialisation, assetisation and rentierisation of housing has extensively examined how debt-fuelled asset price bubbles and private and corporate landlordism aggravate property-based wealth inequalities in distinctive ways. However, an overarching framework explaining how such property-based inequities can be contested within the global world-system is unfortunately still missing. In their unique contribution, Susan J. Smith and Gavin A. Wood fill this gap in the literature, thereby paying attention to looming conflicts on the edges of owner-occupation and rentier capitalism. Their Georgist take on how inequitable wealth distributions can be altered through institutions of home stewardship and temporary ownership is thought-provoking and era-defining. In this commentary, I elaborate on their conceptual framework and make suggestions for future research. Particularly, I pay attention to how the concepts of home stewardship and temporary ownership can be operationalized further. I argue that conceptual clarity is not only needed to implement these concepts into collective consciousness and policy practice, but also to understand their variegated nature in the unevenly developed world-system.
Source: Housing Theory and Society
Author: Gertjan Wijburg
Institution: KU Leuven
Language: English
Subfield: Finance
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Reduced inequalities
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4415127299